I’ve been listening to some early Yazoo jazz, blues and bluegrass recordings and I’ve been staggered to discover how quickly recording techniques improved over the years. Recordings from the early 20s were frankly awful. The blues and bluegrass recordings were only really able to pick up one instrument and a voice but the introduction of electric microphones in the mid to late twenties vastly improved matters. Again in the late thirties technology moved on a pace so that the recordings of Robert Johnson from 1937 are far superior to those of say Blind Blake and Blind Lemon Jefferson in the twenties. Of course it helps significantly when the original master recordings are available rather than scratchy 78’s.It would be interesting to hear what Charlie Patton actually sounded like, but the original master recordings are long gone and the 78’s available are very hissy, so it’s often impossible to work out what he’s singing. By the 40’s sound quality was really pretty good. Not great by modern standards but certainly no impediment to listening.
Posted on: 12 December 2006 by u5227470736789439
Dear Mr Smith,
You make a very valid point about the introduction of the electric microphone into the recording process. Sir Edward Elgar regognised this in a speech on the subject in 1926, when he refered to it as the "most important developement in the gramophone's history until today." [Speech at the opening of the HMV shop in Oxford Street].
Also it is certainly true that if the master parts still exist, then a quality of playback - undreamed of at the time - is now possible with modern transfer techniques. Some of those very early electrical recordings are so fine that it is hard to say if they were done in the twenties or the fifties! Some of Elgar's own recordings show this quite remarkably. At the start in 1926 HMV employed the Western Electric process on licence, but by 1932 were using their own system developed by AD Blumlein. Blumlein had been working for the Columbia Graphophone Company (Petty France, London), and when HMV [Hayes, Middlesex] merged with Columbia to form EMI in 1930/31, Blumlein's developements carried on with even greater vigour. His system carried on in EMI studios right up to 1950! It was superceded by the tape system, largely based on the German technologies of the Magnetophon recorders using tape to record concerts for broadcasting by the Reichsrundfunk. Most of Furtwangler's broadcast Wartime concerts were preserved this way.
Interestingly at the very start of tape the newer technique still was not as fine as Blumlein's old 78 wax cutting system, as many of EMI's recprdings between 1949 and 1951 show, all too clearly!
As an asisde there was a British tape recorder, first used in 1929, which was used by the BBC at that time as well as other European Radio stations, for delayed braodcasting. This used a very expensive steel tape [hense the fact that most recordings were deleted at the re-use of the tape], and had problems that only EMI would solve in the late forties with pitch stability [constant tape speed]. One does wonder what might have happened if the Blattnerphone recording system had been further developed by Blumlein and his collegues at EMI in the early 1930s!
Kindest regards from Fredrik
Posted on: 12 December 2006 by JohanR
A Swedish radio program that plays "older" popular music sometimes plays the last generation of 78's from the mid 1950's. The last time I heard it they played a piece by Les Paul and his wife from 1954 on 78. This is probably the best ever recording I've ever heard! Totally effortless dynamics that seemed to have no limit what so ever, just like real music.
Les Paul, b.t.w. was among the first in the recording business that actually used tape recorders for commercial recordings (I think he was Ampex second ever customer). It is well known that he made the recordings with himself playing all the instruments and he used "sound on sound" in several generations, and with a very good result as he was using eq circuits to get a flat frequency response from the recorders. This at a time when most others used gravity driven cutting systems to record on...
JohanR
